HILLARY CLINTON AND THE DEMOCRATS WERE PLAYINGWITH FIRE WHEN THEY EFFECTIVELY WROTE OFFWHITE WORKERS IN THE SMALL TOWNS AND CITIES OF THE RUST BELT.
I n March [of 2016], I was driving along a road that led from Dayton, Ohio, into its formerly middle-class, now decidedly working-class southwestern suburbs, when I came upon an arresting sight. I was looking for a professional sign-maker who had turned his West Carrollton ranch house into a distribution point for Trump yard signs, in high demand just days prior to the Ohio Republican primary. Instead of piling the signs in the driveway, he had arrayed them in his yard along the road. There they were, dozens and dozens of them, lined up in rows like the uniform gravestones in a military cemetery. The sign man wasn’t home, but he had left a married couple in charge of the distribution. I got talking to the woman, Contessa Hammel. She was 43 and worked at the convenience store at a local Speedway gas station after four years in the military. And this was the first time she was voting in 25 years of eligibility. I was startled to hear this – it’s rare to find voters entering the political process after
decades of disconnection; in fact, I’d met a handyman in his 70s at a Trump rally on the other side of Dayton that same day who said he was voting for the first time, but I had dismissed it as a fluke. I asked Hammel why she’d held back all those years. “I didn’t want to make an unintelligent decision,” she said, in a tone that suggested she was well aware of what an admission that was. But this year’s Republican nominee was different, she said. “He makes it simple for people like me,” she said. “He puts it clearly.” Donald Trump’s stunning win Tuesday, defying all the prognosticators, suggested there were many more people like Hammel out there – people who were so disconnected from the political system that they were literally unaccounted for in the pollsters’ modeling, which relies on past voting behavior. But Hammel was far from the only person I met in my reporting this year who made me think that Trump had spurred something
By Alec MacGillis, ProPublica
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Editor’s note: Two days after the 2016 election, independent investigative news organization ProPublica published this story. We suspect that most “Coastal elites” still don’t get it... It’s not about people loving President Donald Trump. It’s about people hating them .
American Consequences 73
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